Strong Ohio bills to defend innocent lives: Kevin O'Brien

The Virginia State Police arrived -- heavily armed and ready for anything -- on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, too late to save 32 people who had been shot to death by a single gunman. The police can't be everywhere at once, but a person of evil intent can pop up anywhere there's a crowd.Steve Helber/Associated Press

Ohio legislators saved the best for last, and their good work at the close of their 2016 session stands to save a lot of lives.

The governor should sign both, even recognizing that a bill that prohibits the abortion of a baby once its heartbeat is detectable will face tough -- and expensive -- opposition in the courts. Such a law will be well worth trying to preserve, especially if President-elect Donald Trump keeps his pledge to nominate judicial conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For the children, for a change

The General Assembly has debated heartbeat bills before, and the House passed one last year. The Senate balked then, and even Ohio Right to Life backed a less ambitious measure. The objection on the anti-abortion side wasn't that the previous heartbeat bill was intrinsically wrong, but rather that it ultimately would fail in the courts.

A similar bill passed in North Dakota in 2013 was ruled unconstitutional in a federal trial court on two counts: First, the judge ruled that Roe v. Wade had been settled law for 40 years. Second, pegging the law to a fetal heartbeat -- usually detectable at about 12 weeks of life -- ran afoul of the "viability standard" set by the U.S. Supreme Court, which holds that states must allow abortions of children who could not reasonably be expected to survive outside the womb.

Well, back in the late 1850s, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision was settled law, too. Bad decisions can be reversed, and decisions don't get any worse than Roe v. Wade's judge-made law ginning up a "right to privacy" to rationalize the murder of innocents.

On Wednesday, the heartbeat bill's time came in the Ohio Senate. (The House passed it in March.) Good for the lawmakers. Good for Ohio. Good, in the most fundamental sense imaginable, for tens of thousands of children each year.

Now, Kasich should do the right thing. And when the time comes, as it surely will, the state should give the heartbeat law the most vigorous legal defense possible. Getting a better Supreme Court than we had in 1973 to back off the viability standard would be an excellent first step.

Bang -- you're saved

Both of Ohio's legislative bodies struck a blow for common sense this week with the passage of what has been derided by opponents as the "guns everywhere bill."

The bill isn't quite that good, but it's good.

It would open up almost all public places and government buildings to concealed-carry permit holders and, in the wake of the recent terrorist incident at Ohio State University that injured 11 people, would absolve colleges and universities of civil liability for the actions of concealed-carry permit holders. Whether that's enough to induce widespread changes in campus rules so students with permits can legally carry their handguns remains to be seen.

The decision on campus carry would rest with each institution, and I'm betting most would choose not to give students and faculty members the ability to defend themselves effectively in the event of an attack. But at least the blanket prohibition would be out of state law, and that would be progress.

This bill would only make Ohioans safer.

A firearm in the holster of a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit is strictly a defensive weapon. That permit holder has been trained in the use of his firearm and in the laws that govern its use and its mere possession.

Expect to hear a lot of confused caterwauling about how dangerous these meticulous followers of the law will be. Expect to hear a lot of tripe about how, faced with a clear threat, concealed carriers will all shoot one another by mistake. The uninformed will do their best to whip up the misinformed, but here's the fact that matters:

People intent on doing evil don't go to the trouble of taking training classes or buying permits. All they need is a cause to kill for or a cracked view of the world. (Yes, I see the overlap there.) If no one immediately at hand has the means to stop them, they do a lot of damage and cause a lot of heartache.

The students who were attacked last month at Ohio State were extremely fortunate that an armed campus policeman showed up seconds after their assailant made his intentions known. Thirty-two students at Virginia Tech in 2007 weren't so lucky. Nor were they allowed the means to stop their assailant themselves. All they stopped were bullets.

The Ohio General Assembly deserves credit for its effort to get more good people with guns into the mix on campus and in lots of other currently unsafe places.